5 Things Leaders Get Wrong with FranklinCovey’s 4 Disciplines of Execution

Look, the problem isn’t with the Disciplines themselves – I was on the team that developed them back in the early 2000’s – I’m a believer. The problem is that leaders, teams, and organizations often make several critical errors when deploying them. Avoid these errors, and the 4 Disciplines of Execution is a machine that forges engagement and prints value. Get them wrong, and you’ll start to think the Disciplines don’t work. Let’s talk straight here – the 4 Disciplines ALWAYS work – IF you get them right! I’m going to share the top five mistakes that I have seen in my nearly two decades of work in this space.

Mistake #1 – Failure to Use The 4 Disciplines as Your Operating System

As the operating system on your computer allows you to run programs that produce work products, the 4 Disciplines of Execution is the operating system for creating your best personal and professional life. No matter how powerful your computer is, Microsoft’s Office Suite won’t work without some version of Windows or Apple OS. The 4 Disciplines is the operating system, not just a program. Treat it like a program, and results will be fleeting.

Mistake #2 –Failure to Pick a Strategic Goal

Strategy is about the fundamental value you're trying to deliver to customers/stakeholders, and about which customers/stakeholders you’re primarily interested in serving. The essence of strategy is choice, (saying “no” to some things and being very deliberate about what you say “yes” to), making trade-offs, and creating fit (aligning activities/behavior across the organization to deliver on the brand promise).

The first discipline of execution is to Focus on the Wildly Important. It asks the question, “What measure, if focused on, given special treatment, and improved significantly, would create the greatest value to the organization?” There is no strategy or focus in a profit or margin WIG. Profit is the price of entry for for-profit organizations, and it is an outcome of everything a company does. The ultimate, overarching goal for every for-profit organization is always profit, but profit is usually NOT a good WIG. Rather, a good enterprise WIG might be around new product sales as a percentage of revenue or growth within a specific market segment or market share or cost-reductions (especially if the strategy is around being the low-cost provider of a product or service).

It is common for sales teams to want to set a WIG to hit their sales goal. When I push, they will sometimes come back with a WIG to exceed the sales targets! No! Hitting your sales number is your job – it is not a WIG. New customer growth or optimal product mix or close rate or speed to close or average size of sale might be WIGs, but revenue is usually NOT a good WIG.

Teams that work on a portfolio of projects will often argue about which project is their WIG. Usually, this is NOT a good approach to identifying a WIG for a team that works in a project environment (like IT or HR). The project team should not be determining which projects are most important – that should be decided by the leaders who use these teams’ service. Project teams might look for WIGs to improve performance across the portfolio of projects they manage with possible WIGs around timely project delivery, budget, quality, business outcomes, and stakeholder satisfaction.

Effective WIGs will guide employees in the choices they make about how to add strategic value on a daily basis. While continuous improvement is what you do in the daily whirlwind of running the business, the best strategic WIGs focus the team/organization on big wins. That said, sometimes a WIG defines a performance gap around a specific operational vulnerability that must be addressed before pursuing a big win (i.e., a safety WIG).

Mistake #3 – Failure to Get to Small Outcome Lead Measures

Most people using the 4 Disciplines don’t even know that there are two types of lead measures: Leveraged Behaviors and Small Outcomes. Leveraged Behaviors help eliminate chronic inconsistency in the activities that produce the results you are trying to get. Examples include: # of cold calls per day or weekly face-to-face meetings for a sales team trying to grow market share; wearing personal protective equipment (PPE) on a manufacturing floor in an effort to reduce the number of OSHA recordables; calling guests by name in hospitality to improve a Guest Satisfaction Score (GSS); and following a call-handling script on 100% of inbound calls at a call center to achieve a higher upsell rate.

The problem with Leveraged Behavior lead measures is that they are boring! Imagine that you are a sales associate on a team with a WIG around new product sales and a lead measure of making ten cold calls per day. During the weekly accountability session, the best you can commit to doing in the coming week is to perform the lead measure! Week after week, you tell your team members that your commitment that week is to make ten cold calls per day. Zzzzzzzzz!

Small Outcome lead measures allow higher levels of engagement and thinking. They allow for multiple acceptable ways to impact the scoreboard when people are making commitments in the weekly WIG Session. Examples of Small Outcome Lead Measures include:

• Sales Team: Moving a specific dollar value of opportunity deeper into the sales pipeline weekly to drive a new customer sales growth WIG
• Project Team: Achieving weekly project plan milestones to support a stakeholder satisfaction WIG
• Retail Team: Weekly stockouts to support a units-per-transaction WIG
• Construction Team: Weekly availability of equipment, tools, supplies, and drawings for a field productivity WIG
• Manufacturing: Weekly machine availability to drive an efficiency (OEE) WIG
• Service/Repair: Techs to complete 100% of planned maintenance activities weekly to achieve a WIG of reducing service calls
• Education: Student performance on weekly quizzes to improve an academic growth WIG

Remember, that Small Outcome and Leveraged Behavior lead measures need to be sensitive enough to move every week. Many teams stall out on WIGs with leads that move less frequently.

Mistake #4 – Using Scoreboards to Name and Shame

In a recent FastCompany article, Brene Brown wrote, “Shame–the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging–breeds fear. It crushes our tolerance for vulnerability, thereby killing engagement, innovation, creativity, productivity, and trust.” Leaders must be careful in clarifying the intent of a scoreboard. The purpose of a scoreboard is to motivate and engage people to step up their performance and find a way to win. The properly designed scoreboard allows people to wrestle with performance data and should inspire them to experiment, learn, and share. A leader who uses scoreboard data to embarrass team members and pressure them into performing better will find team members going through the motions and sometimes even rationalizing unethical scorekeeping. Effective scoreboards celebrate winning, point to those whose effectiveness should be replicated, and call attention to those who need assistance and additional support. The best performers are accountable to ensure that everyone on the team is winning.

Mistake #5 – Getting Accountability All Wrong

The traditional view of accountability is that leaders must hold people accountable. This mindset is negative, controlling, and drives dependence. Leaders who are serious about execution see accountability as a personal choice and the catalyst for success. The accountability in Discipline 4 is about counting on each other. It’s about team members making personal promises to each other about what they will do to help the team win. To enable this type of accountability, leaders must solve the accountability equation: Goal Clarity + Commitment + Cadence = Results. High clarity, combined with commitment, creates “owners” who feel empowered to get stuff done. Low clarity and little commitment lead to drifting while high clarity with little commitment leads only to compliance.

Commitment happens when the driving forces in a performance situation overcome the restraining forces preventing the behavior change required to make progress. To support the highest levels of commitment, smart leaders provide focus and goal clarity; create a daily or weekly rhythm of making and reporting on commitments; ensure team members create and then maintain scoreboards; and encourage high levels of involvement in determining WIGs and lead measures.

If you’ve been making one or more of these mistakes – STOP! If you know someone else who is blundering in their 4DX implementation, then please share this article with them. If you see things differently or have a perspective to add, please comment to deepen the conversation. I also invite you to take a look at the other articles I have written on LinkedIn and follow me by clicking +follow next to my name above.

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